The Spanking Writers

There were thirty or so of them at St. Mary’s to see in the New Year. Their families lived abroad – posted far and wide on behalf of Her Majesty or for some multinational corporation. Some of the girls had flown home for Christmas, but headed back to England early. Other parents had travelled here for the festivities with their daughters, but pressures of work had dragged them back to far-flung climes as soon as Boxing Day had passed.

The girls been allowed to stay up late. A pyjama-clad picnic in the sixth-form common room was the order of the night; after all, the catering staff weren’t going to come in to cook when they could be celebrating in the pub. Music was turned up loud; they sang, danced, hugged, counted down the minutes towards midnight.And then the Headmaster had walked in. Smiling, festive. Until he’d noticed the bottle of vodka.

–

She waited in the dark corridor, alone. She was cold, her dressing gown too thin to keep out the end-of-year chill in the near-empty school.

She could hear their laughter in the distance, and then the cheers. It must be midnight: the new year had come.

He’d be here in a moment, once he’d wished the others well for the coming twelve months. “You, of all people, should understand the rules about alcohol,” he’d said. Prefects should set an example, he’d added. She knew the punishment. She should go and wait outside his study.

How many would he give her? Four? Six? Would he permit her the modesty of her dressing gown, her pyjama bottoms, or punish her on the bare? Over his desk (like the only other time she’d been here to be punished, two years before), or bent over touching her toes?

She heard footsteps; stood up straight. “Ah, Emma,” he exclaimed, as he fumbled in a pocket for his keys. “Come in. Let’s get this over with quickly, shall we?”

—

We hope you like our little end of year story – and enjoy your new year’s celebrations this evening, wherever you may be. We wish you every happiness for 2009!

In “The Crime of Punishment” Margaret Wilson describes an episode of public flogging that wouldn’t look out of place in a comedy:

The beadle had his left hand filled with red ochre, through which after every stroke, he drew the lash of his whip, leaving the appearance of a wound upon the skin [of a thief], but in reality not hurting him at all.

This being perceived by the constable, who followed the beadle to see that he did his duty, he (the constable) applied the cane, without any such management or precaution, to the shoulder of the beadle…

The double flogging continued, until a lass of Silver End, pitying the pitiful beadle, joined the procession, and placing herself immediately behind the constable, seized him by the capillary club, and pulling him backward by the same, slapped his face with Amazonian fury…

I could not forbear to inform you how the beadle thrashed the thief, the constable the beadle, and the lady the constable, and how the thief was the only person who suffered nothing.

I think we should play out this scene at a party some time. Bagsy I’ll be the thief!

Trevor Howard is one of my movie idols, having starred in both The Third Man and Brief Encounter, two of my favourite films of all time.

I was delighted, therefore, to chance upon an old copy of his biography, by Terence Pettigrew. And, as with all accounts of the lives of upper-class Englishmen of a certain era, there was much to fascinate readers here.

Howard’s sister, Sheila: “went to an English school which advertised quite a lot in the East, and quite a lot of the girls’ parents were based in Ceylon and southern India.” He followed her to the UK a few years later.

“Adolescence… meant being looked after by a procession of strangers doing it strictly for the money. Love never entered the equation,” the biographer explained.

There were hardly ever “displays of affection – hugs, kisses or an arm around the shoulder.” Some suffered “at the hands of so-called guardians… beatings were commonplace.”

The idea of a girl punished by her guardian must be a stock fantasy for many spankos, much as we’d abhor the actual reality. So I read on, to find that many of those shipped from abroad to boarding school: “arrived in Britain with no idea who would be meeting them.” That, in itself, sparks all sorts of dark ideas of girls spending the journey dreading who might have been assigned to look after them – or even being greeted and taken away by the wrong person entirely.

And I’d always imagined that a pupil would have a specific guardian, to whose house they would return every vacation. Not always so, it seemed:

“The college had a list of ’suitable’ boarding houses where long-distance pupils were farmed out for the holidays, but little or no prior vetting of these establishments appears to have been done.”

My fantasy boarding house owners would look after several girls each holiday. They’d hand them a list of rules on their arrival, and would punish any breaches most severely.

I wonder if the volume I discovered on Abebooks the other morning breaks any records for the highest price-per-page of a book on educational history.

It may be mere eight pages long, but “Regulations for the Catholic Girls’ School at Ugbrook” comes in at a staggering £201.25 – excluding postage, of course.

I need to win the lottery, as is sounds quite fascinating. Published in 1841, only three other copies are known to exist: one in the British Library, one in the Pitts Theology Library at Emory University, and the third at Georgetown University.

Within its “original pale green card covers” can be found:

A nice example of a privately-printed prospectus for a private girls’ school in early Victorian Devon. [Ugbrook itself was the Clifford seat (and hamlet) just outside Chudleigh roughly half way between Exeter and Newton Abbot in South Devon].

The school was being established by Lord Clifford of Chudleigh to be solely for the education of the female children of those who are or have been tenants, servants, or labourers on his estate, or tradesmen in the employ of his family at Ugbrook’. The school was to be free.

While religious education would be under the direction of Lord Clifford’s Catholic Chaplain, ‘all other instruction, and whatever relates to the order, discipline, and cleanliness of the school, will be under the sole direction of the schoolmistress’.

The Regulations include rules for corporal punishment (children must ’submit willingly’). Of the 16 Regulations, no fewer than 7 are to do with punishments for faults, the emphasis being on ‘disgrace’, ‘obstinacy’, ‘penance’, ‘correction’, and so forth.

Orphan girls were each to be allocated to ‘a respectable married woman of known mild character in the neighbourhood’, who would act in loco parentis.

I rather fancy an Ugbrook-themed weekend!

Today is Abel’s birthday (three cheers!), and the family went out to a smart London restaurant together, to express our love with food.

Gazing across the beautiful room, we wondered about an imposing staircase that rose out of it. Did it lead, perhaps, to a private dining room?

“Oh, that’s where the manager’s office is,” said our waitress overhearing the conversation. She leaned to Abel with a conspiratorial air, and added: “This is where you go when you’re naughty.”

Really? Abel and I echanged winks and significant glances all through the lunch, until it was time for coffee… and the waitress had failed to bring enough cups.

“I’m so sorry,” she exclaimed. “Is it the manager’s office for me?”

We graciously waved off the unfortunate slip-up,  but I can’t help but imagine the girl slowly ascend the stairs in full view of the diners – and emerge fifteen minutes later with a tear-stained face, walking even slower than before, stealing surreptitious rubs on the back of her skirt.

Happy birthday, Abel!

I was listening in to a conversation between Abel and his mother, when it took a very amusing turn.

Abel’s mum: “Those slippers were only 4 pounds.”

Abel (winking at me): “I wouldn’t know what to do with a pair of slippers if I had them.”

Abel’s mum: “Well…” (pause) (longer pause) (even longer pause) “We do wear them.”

That’s one use of a spanking implement I don’t often consider.

(That reminded me of the “Top 5 arguments for and against the slipper” that I once came up with. I still stand by each one.)

According to a report on the BBC News site:

America’s CIA has found a novel way to gain information from fickle Afghan warlords – supplying sex-enhancing drug Viagra, a US media report says.

“In one case, a 60-year-old warlord with four wives was given four pills and four days later detailed Taleban movements in return for more.” The gentleman concerned was…

…the head of a clan in southern Afghanistan who had not co-operated – operatives saw he had four younger wives.

The pills were explained and offered. Four days later the agents returned.

“He came up to us beaming,” the Post quoted an agent as saying. “He said, ‘You are a great man.’ And after that we could do whatever we wanted in his area.”

Coming next: spanking videos for kinky warlords?

The true meaning of Christmas was not forgotten in our household yesterday. It was Jesus’s birthday, right?

Don’t worry, Jesus. Abel has delivered your birthday spanking to our guest Catherine and me, all 2008 swats and one to grow on.

*rubs extremely tender bottom*

Here’s how it went:

• Most spanks were no more than gentle taps.
• But some were definitely not. (Hence, certain difficulty sitting down today.)
• The swats were spread throughout the day – we started off before breakfast, and finished just as it was time for good girls to be tucked in bed.
• Abel got one smack.
• The cat got ten. (She purred her way through.)
• Every casual swat delivered to a passing behind counted towards the final tally.
• The implements came out for certain sections of the birthday spanking. There was a hairbrush, a new razor strop I gave Abel for Christmas (silly me), a carpet beater, a soft flogger, a martinet, a bamboo swagger stick and a cane.
• After we were done, Abel needed a serious shoulder rub to alleviate repetitive strain pain in his shoulder. Though that might have been from all the cooking.
• And then there was more whipping – just because.

Christmas is here   Our local city, though, seems to have been in full-on festive mood for an age. Take a couple of Saturdays ago: a quick trip into town turned into a major expedition, as we sat in traffic for an hour to travel the final mile. The reason? A “Christmas fayre”. Bah, humbug!

Still, the experience – combined with an enjoyable evening’s play with a friend who seemed keen to work her way through as many of our implements as possible – led to a very vivid dream that night. At work, some of my time is spent with purchasing teams. One such hired me to help them: they needed a Christmas grotto for their office reception, and wanted me to write their specification and choose the grotto-supplier from amongst their bidders.

All was well, save for two issues that caused lengthy debate. Firstly, would the Health and Safety people require Father Christmas to sign into the office in the morning using ‘Santa Claus’, or would they expect him to use his ‘real’ name. (Sorry, children: there may be some Santas out there who are only pretending).

And then there was the question that I insisted they include in their Request for Proposal:

How do you discipline your elves?

There was general agreement that it would be perfectly reasonable for Santa to place any misbehaving elves over his knee for a sound bare-bottomed spanking in the grotto; we wondered whether he would need a separate room to administer canings to them should their behaviour be especially bad. Or maybe he’d bring some birches with him from the forests of Lapland.

We do hope that you all have a wonderful day, whether or not you celebrate Christmas itself. Now, off to stuff the goose…

He’s coming tonight… Are you ready for your birching?